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A tale of scrap metal code – Part III

In the first part of this tale about an examined software project, I described the initial situation and high-level observations about the project. The second part dove into the actual source code and pointed out what’s wrong on this level. This part will summarize everything and give some hints on how to avoid creating scrap metal code.

About the project

If you want to know more about the project, read the first part of this tale. In short, the project looked like a normal Java software, but unfolded into a nightmare, lacking basic requirements like tests, dependency management or continuity.

A summary of what went wrong

In short, the project failed in every respect except being reasonable functional and delivering business value to the customers. I will repeat this sentence soon, but let’s recall the worst parts again. The project had no tests. The project modularization was made redundant by circular dependencies and hardwired paths. No dependency management was in place, neither through the means of a build tool nor by manual means (like jar versions). The code was bloated and overly complex. The application’s data model was a widely distributed network of arbitrary collections with implicit connections via lookup keys. No effort was spent to grasp exception handling or multithreading. The cleverness was rather invested into wildcard usage of java’s reflection API capabilities. And when the cleverness of the developer was challenged, he resorted to code comments instead of making the code more accessible.

How can this be avoided?

First, you need to know exactly what it is you want to avoid. Let me repeat that the project was sold to happily paying customers who gained profit using it. Many software projects fail to deliver this utmost vital aspect of virtually every project. The problem with this project isn’t apparent yet, because it has a presence (and a past). It’s just that it has no future. I want to give some hints how to develop software projects with a future while still delivering business value to the customer.

Avoid the no-future trap

The most important thing to make a project future-proof is to restrain yourself from taking shortcuts that pay off now and need to be paid back later. You might want to believe that you don’t need to pay back your technical debts (the official term for these shortcuts) or that they will magically disappear sometimes, but both scenarios are quite unlikely. If your project has any chance to keep being alive over a prolonged amount of time, the technical debts will charge interest.

Of course you can take shortcuts to meet tight deadlines or fit into a small budget. This is called prototyping and it pays off in terms of availability (“time to market”) and scope (“trial version”). Just remember that a prototype isn’t meant for production. You definitely need the extra time and/or budget to fix the intentional shortcomings in the code. You won’t feel the difference right now (hey, it works, what else should it do?), but it will return with compound interest in a few years. The project in this tale was dead after three years. The technical debt had added up beyond being repairable.

Analyzing technical debts

It’s always easy to say that you should “do it right” in the first place. What could the developer for project at hands have done differently to be better off now?

1. Invest in automated tests

When I asked why the project has no tests at all, the developer replied that “it surely would be better to have tests, yet there was no time to write them“. This statement implies that tests take more time to write than they save acting as a guideline and a safety net. And it is probably true for every developer just starting to write tests. You will feel uncomfortable, your tests will be cumbersome and everything will slow down. Until you gain knowledge and experience in writing tests. It is an investment. It will pay off in the future, not right now. If you don’t start now, there will be no future payout. And even better: now your investment, not your debt, will accumulate interest. You might get used to writing tests and start being guided by them. They will mercilessly tell you when your anticipated solution is overly complex. And they will stay around and guard your code long after you forgot about it. Tests are a precaution, not an afterthought.

2. Review and refactor your code

The project has a line count of 80,000 lines of ugly code. I’m fairly confident that it can be reduced to 20,000 lines of code without losing any functionality. The code is written with the lowest possible granularity, with higher concepts lurking everywhere, waiting to be found and exposed. Of course, you cannot write correct, concise and considerate code on your first attempt. This is why you should revisit old code in a recurring manner. If you followed advice number one and brought your tests in place, you can apply every refactoring of the book’s catalog and still be sure that you rather fixed this part instead of breaking it. Constantly reviewing and refactoring your code has the additional advantage of a code base that gets more proficient alongside yourself. There are no “dark regions” (the code to never be read or touched again, because it hurts) if you light them up every now and then. This will additionally slow you down when you start out, but put you on afterburner when you realize that you can rescue any code from rotting by applying the refactoring super-powers that you gained through pratice. It’s an investment again, aiming at midterm return of investment.

3. Refrain from clever solutions

The project of this tale had several aspects that the developer thought were “clever”. The only thing with “clever” is that it’s a swearword in software programming. Remember the clever introduction of wildcard runtime classloading to provide a “plugin mechanism”? Pure poison if you ever wanted your API to be stable and documented, just like a plugin interface should be. Magic numbers throughout your code? Of course you are smart enough to handle this little extra obfuscation. Except when you aren’t. You aren’t sure how exception handling works? Be clever and just “empty catch Exception” everywhere the compiler points you to. In this project, the developer knew this couldn’t be the right solution. Yet, he never reviewed the code when he one day knew how to handle exceptions in a meaningful manner. Let me rest my case by stating that if you write your code as clever as you can handle it, you won’t be able to read it soon, as reading code is harder than writing it.

Summary

Over the course of this tale, you learned a lot about a failed project. In this article, I tried to give you some advice (in the form of three basic rules) on how this failure could probably have been avoided. Of course, the advice isn’t complete. There is much more you could do to improve yourself and your project. Perhaps the best self-training program for developer skills is the Clean Code Developer Initiative (it’s mostly german text yet, so here is an english blog post about it), based upon the book “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob).

3 thoughts on “A tale of scrap metal code – Part III”

After enough changes are made, you would surely increase the version counter and release the product.
I wonder how you “sell” this new version to your customer who has to spend time and money to test and deploy it? The only thing that changes through refactoring is maintainability but the improvement is hard to dollarize.

Hi Vasili,
first of all, you have to distinguish between project and product code.

Project code is written because a customer pays money for it. He surely wants a “return of investment” in the near future and might not accept a new version of the project that has no changes other than “internal improvements”. For this customer, the project before the refactoring works as good as afterwards. You should never let your project slip in a state where you have to apply heavy refactorings to carry on.

Product code is written because the vendor found customers that pay money to obtain the current version of a product. The customers don’t pay for future (or current) development, but for development effort already done. They aren’t directly in charge to drive the development. As long as the product earns more money than it costs for development (and sales and whatever), it will be continued. Most of this code is written with “time to market” in mind, not sustainability, because you can’t predict the success of the product. And this is where refactorings of a bad code base pay off as an investment in future revenue. It’s not the short term benefit of the new version, it’s the long term ability to sell the product with new features and bugfixes. Every sold copy of the product after the refactoring might count as “enabled only through the means of the refactorings applied”. This is a bit over-the-top, but I think you get the idea.